Category: poetry

A love letter to a city

I want to love like loving a city
Like soaking in the ocean, the parks, the energy, the sounds
And knowing that city will contain grunge and turmoil
Construction causing sleepless mornings
And nights filled with a spectacular set of stars
So that even the darkness
Lights up my eyes
So that even the light pollution
From the building that quiets the stars shows people dancing, and chatting,
and watering their plants.
I want to tip the saxophonist of my dreams
To sway with strangers and play percussion with my feet
With all the traffic and crowds and dozens of stories sitting on a patch of grass,
dozing off on Dizengoff
with bottles of store-bought beer, and ripped jeans, and a concrete fountain.

I want to love like a city
To walk through the noise and then
One Friday,
Get flavor-packed coffee and walk to where I can inhale freshly cut grass
And an ocean with five different blues
Forget my sunscreen once then
Burn my scar so badly it may never recover then
Recover then
Forget my sunscreen and play chicken with the afternoon sun all over again.
I want to sing to God on the rooftops, sunset glowing
Until Shabbat sets in and fills its peace.
I want to feel five different blues and learn how to paint them
To write them instead of fight them and learn each of their names
So that one day I can greet them like old friends on the boulevard, with the sun
Squinting through the trees and still
I’ll smile at them as I pass.

I want to love like I love this city
In exhilaration and heat
And joy, tea steeping,
Falling deeper and over again.

I did not know my heart could take this

To feel this pain, to feel so viscerally
Alive.
Not despite, but because.
Not with you but it was
So beautiful and heart rendering all at once.
I’m feeling it all at once
And I’m standing, still.
I didn’t know that my heart could withstand
With standing still in the presence of blazing, searing flames.
“Try me,”
It says. “You’ll see. Go for it.
You’ll be amazed.
I’ll make it through.
I’ll take a beating and keep beating
And beating”

And by the salty air I’m breathing, still,
Not despite
But because
I opened my heart to you.
And it was fire
So beautiful it drew my heart to speak:
“Try me.”

kabbalat shabbat

Here I am, taking a day off
Out of office, so to speak, though we’re all out of office
Out of other things too
Out of routine, out of our minds
And mindfulness seems the only route to stabilize, if just for 10 minutes.
My phone has been the source of stress and updates and checking in
Of memes, of virtual love, of breathing,
If just for 10 minutes.
The meditation voiceover tells me to drink in my breath on the brink of international collapse it tells me to drink in my breath and
Breathe out, like glitter in a snow globe.
I love watching glitter in a snow globe.
Breathing out, watching it glide,
This country shuts down when it snows and not when it wars
and also
And also
And also
The world shuts down and none of us goes anywhere,
Careful and
Fragile.
Glued to the news.
I breathe out and watch the glitter, slow, imagining the astronaut snow globe on a desk at work, remembering the glitter around my eyes on Purim, when it all seemed unstable and it was.
And it is.
Though unstable in a different way,
Stable in our instability, waking up to our alarms every day,
Putting on pants one leg at a time, even if they’re pajamas.

I dressed up as Miss Universe
For Purim, I wore stars and glitter and said
I love the universe because I can’t hold it, or fathom,
Because it makes me feel lost in all its enormity and found in the way it holds me,
Structure,
God,
Saying, you can’t hold Me, but look around-
I’m holding you.
You will shake the globe.
The glitter will fall,
We will wake, we must,
We will love, we will cry.

Our eyes will sparkle
And we will shake off the dust again.

matchmaker, matchmaker

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, make me the match
to ignite fire when the wicks won’t work,
to strike friction, turn fictions to energy, torque,
take sparks and route them through as I write,
strike
all from my mind and now in the world.

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, make me the match,
find me a find.
Some sort of muse that isn’t boys or my mind.
Something I can use past the Bechdel Test blues
(which, yes, I’ve failed already).

Matchmaker, take me out of the box.
Instill in me as Your creation
a steady gleam of inspiration:
heat without being burnt, burns without losing feeling,
feeling without losing my ground.

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, show me what’s found,
a torch in a cavernous mountain of sound:
rhymes unexpected, rhythms untold,
fuel phrases I’ll underline, highlight, and bold,
tap, scribble, and obsess.

Continue reading →

life, now:

A Constant Flow of Figuring Out:
how to cook, clean,
how to salary, how to bills,
how to relate responsibly
to family, friends,
how to language,
how to home,
how to walk
with confidence,
how to appreciate
when I’m older,
how to stop insisting
that I can’t, how to will,
how to live
where the sidewalk ends,
how to still
my mind when looking
at the sea,
how,
when deterred,
how to capture the word:
“lizrom.”

4-way bench

On Ben Gurion Blvd
(I’m watching)
3 grown men arguing
on a 4-way bench –

they yell, gesture, then
one stands up and
(before he storms off)
the whole thing tilts away

like it’s a grown up seesaw;
he pulls his weight from the fight
and it no longer stands.

I sat on that exact bench a week before
(I remembered)

when I sat down, it all tilted toward me
as if everyone else had already stormed off
and I was waiting for them to come back.

habitat, or, spring break

So this is home in New Orleans:

new or built
on contrast rhythms.

Poverty rhymes with candy-colored houses,
iron, swirly painted gates and window cover grates.
In this home
is destruction
and construction and
the highest incarceration rate in the world,
so they say
sky and baby blues
sunflower yellows and
cherry reds

(Who are we to be here, and who are they?)

They said,
Before the flood
we would not leave our homes.
With no insurance
and our wrinkles, we gathered
our things would be gone
if we returned.
We prayed.
“I survived Betsy,
and I’ll survive this.”

In a home for Doris,
86-year old woman in the 7th Ward,
we fill in nail holes with hummus.
Every cab driver warns us not to go here at night.
All day we roar along
with power tools and music from the early aughts.
Those of us who know what we’re doing have done this before.
Those of us who do not
thought we ought
and start to build a part of the porch fence.
We accustom to the site, the sound of the angled saw,
level and drill and begin to see
a house being willed from ground. Continue reading →

‘out, damned spot! out, I say!’

Red circle with a crisp white number through
Notification center, sans serif
THIS MIGHT BE HIM and yet, you don’t know if
Left unread, the upper left disrupts blue

It’s not as if you killed someone. Instead
You sit there wondering if the like you’ve spun
Should merit this encircled, glaring “1”
Replay his words as you get into bed

Sleep will come whether or not you know
You tell yourself, but you believe it not
Then simply out of need to nix the spot
A soldier, and afeard? Your face aglow

On your side of the room, the rest is dark
Messages hidden from what they may be
And as the narrow number turns to “3”
With ringing heart you reach for scarlet mark

in a moment

My current mode is temporary.
Roller coasting (which I’ve never liked)
waiting
for it to be fast, exciting, terrifying
for being thrown for loops
and right-side-ups again.

The sooner my car tips off the edge,
Od m’at I fly
Leaving behind those with whom I’ve launched, laughed,
hands held
From whom I’ve learned
I can’t calculate the hows of my goodbyes
or whens or ifs?
Who knows how tight our cars are bound
once the ride starts up again?

Damn, would you take a look at the view from up here?

Od m’at, the camera flashes
We all, forever grinning in a
snap
worth a million words and the wait.

the tree lighting gripe, or: strugs on mugs

I just got to Tree Lighting and Lordy
How is the line this long at 5:40?
Yet instead of submitting to impatience and strife
I talk to first years about “A Year in the Life.”

6:10, I’m waiting, more tempted to cheat
And cut the line, joining randos I’ll meet.
I won’t. But will I get a shirt? Who knows
If I’ll regain feeling in all of my toes?

It’s 6:30 and in the hella cold
The first years around me make me feel old
I skip ahead upon the text of my friend
Who is further than I from the line’s end

Now they’re out of shirts, but fear not!
They’ve still got mugs and hot–
Kidding, no chocolate, but if I wait there’s a chance
There’ll be something left by the time I advance.

6:50! Okay! They check my ID!!
“I *never* get swag,” I say triumphantly.
I walk up to the table and right then they shout,
“If you’re waiting for shirts or mugs, we’re out!”